Course Description

Most teacher training courses and learning materials focus on learners who are already familiar with the Roman alphabet and have good literacy skills in their first language. It can be daunting to teach a class of learners who require additional support with their literacy, especially if they share a class with students with strong literacy skills. This course outlines how to identify adult ESOL literacy learners and what additional skills they require.  It also offers some practical tips and activities to support adult ESOL literacy learners within mixed ability classes. 

Please note: Throughout this course, we use English phonemic symbols to convey English sounds to teachers. If you are unfamiliar with the English phonemic symbols, you may like to brush up your understanding first, with the relevant ELT Training Library courses available.  It is best to avoid teaching phonemic symbols to ESOL literacy learners, however, as this can be confusing for them.  At this level, it is best to focus their learning solely on the Roman alphabet. 


What are learners saying?

5 star rating

Teaching Adult ESOL Literacy

Pauline Blake-Johnston

Good introduction to the area of Adult ESOL Literacy, simple activities to make distinctions in what an ESOL lits learner might need etc opportunity to unco...

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Good introduction to the area of Adult ESOL Literacy, simple activities to make distinctions in what an ESOL lits learner might need etc opportunity to uncover an introduction to elements of what you might need to work on with an ESOL Lits learner - useful course if you know nothing, a good place to start to understand what ESOL Literacies is about.

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4 star rating

Good introduction to the fundamentals

Genevieve Constantine

Good introduction to the fundamentals of teaching ESOL literacy to adult learners.

Good introduction to the fundamentals of teaching ESOL literacy to adult learners.

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Course Author

Course Author Emily Bryson

Emily Bryson is an ELT Materials Writer and ESOL Lecturer. She has written digital ELT materials for publishers such as MacMillan and the British Council. Emily has been an ESOL Lecturer at City of Glasgow College since 2007 and in that time has gained experience teaching all levels of ESOL students and developed a wide range of ESOL for Vocational Purposes courses. She has also completed various secondments such as Project Co-ordinator at the ESOL Network Project, ESOL Development Officer at Education Scotland and Peer Education Programme Manager at the Scottish Refugee Council. Emily has spoken at various international conferences, and has published a book on ESOL Resources.